CTC Day One: The Opening Ceremonies

I love the Olympics.  There is just something about combining ancient, yet novel sports with intense nationalism that really gets me going.  I love them so much that I get inherently excited for the Opening Ceremonies, even though, in a vacuum, the Opening Ceremonies, well, aren’t all that exciting.  But, I love them anyway because there are enough allusions to what is to come over the next two or three weeks that the actual pointlessness of the Ceremonies is almost completely obscured.

Well, my friends, tonight is the 2012 CTC’s Opening Ceremonies.  There are only two games, and they pit the four worst teams in the irrelevant Big South Conference.  Each game tonight is only going to be worth about 0.1% of the final total, so it would be a stretch to say that they even mean anything for the CTC.

BUT…just the fact that someone (realistically, a group of someones) will be in first place in the CTC by about 9:30 tonight makes tonight phenomenal…in a bit of an ostentatious, artsy, Opening Ceremonies kind of way.

As of me writing this, we have 14 entries into the CTC (we do expect a couple more to filter in…) and the first conference is quite chalky, at least as far as a champion goes.  10 people have top-seeded UNC-Asheville winning this tournament.  3 people (Lynch, Primm, and Teddy) have #2-seeded Coastal Carolina, and one lone voice in the wilderness (Mac) is backing the 3rd-seeded Campbell Fightin’ Camels.

As for tonight’s first-round, it is just the 7-10 and 8-9 games tonight.  Both underdogs have 3 people backing them tonight.  RSmith has both underdogs, while 9th-seeded Gardner-Webb could pull off the minor upset for GrossJr and Primm as well.  #10 Radford would provide a slightly larger upset to Alexi and Bry, along with RSmith, if they can beat #8 High Point.  But, while upset points are nice, the two people with the most at stake are two people who are riding both favorites.  J and Lohse both need VMI to beat Radford tonight because they both picked the Keydets to go to the Big South title game, so to lose a finalist on Day One would be a rather ominous beginning to the 2012 CTC for a couple of veterans.